Recently as most rack rental customers are aware of it’s not easy to find an available rack or mock lab session. Our security rack rentals are running near 100% capacity, the SP racks are also near 100% capacity, voice is already near 75% capacity and R&S rack rentals are near 92.5% capacity. Currently we are out of power and space at our two offices in the Reno Technology Center. We have just signed a lease on a new 4200sqft hosting facility. This will allow us to expand to over 400 CCIE racks. We have already started purchasing the additional hardware for the new racks and they should start becoming available in November so watch for sessions that are currently sold out to become available.

Around the middle of November you will see the start times of the rack rentals and mock labs vary (every 3 hours a session will start). This is designed to accommodate our customers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Currently the sessions start at inconvenient times for customers in these locations.

The voice racks now support EZVPN and SSL VPN connections. We have installed two VPN routers for redundancy and to allow for multiple connections. This means you can now use your own phones and/or soft phones. We are also adding additional 7960s to each rack. After next week you will see one additional 7960 phone added to the HQ site bringing the total to three 7960s and one additional 7960 for the BR1 site bring the total to two 7960s.

We will have a voice bootcamp rental kit available for anyone running their own voice CCIE bootcamps. Currently vendors that are renting out our voice racks for bootcamps need to provide their own IP phones and router/PIX/ASA for the VPN connection. The new kit that is identical to the kit we will start using for the voice bootcamps includes (per student) three 7960 phones, an ATA 186 and an analog phone. There is also one VG248, two 3550 24 port PoE switches, one 2811 and the necessary cables needed to connect everything up.

I would like to add that our voice rack rentals are only $15 per 5.5 hours. In addition to our voice products and classes you should be able to do any vendor’s practice labs on our voice racks. To view our topology click here.

About Brian Dennis, CCIE #2210:

Brian Dennis has been in the networking industry for more than 22 years, with a focus on Cisco networking for the past 16 years. Brian achieved his first CCIE in Routing & Switching in 1996, and is currently the only ten year CCIE that holds five CCIE certifications. Prior to working with INE, Brian taught and developed CCIE preparation courses for various well known training organizations. Brian not only brings his years of teaching experience to the classroom, but also years of real world enterprise and service provider experience.

8 Responses to “Graded Labs Rack Rental Updates”

It’s about time. This is long overdue. The lab start times are really not that convenient for East Coast folks either, so I am glad to hear new time slots are opening up. I am glad to see the business expanding and more so, I will now be able to use my tokens to schedule a lab and get off Dynamips for a while.

That’s really a good news for IE! Applaud!
Here I want to raise a new topic – Could you provide response/answer to our technical question regarding your product (ie, security workbook) as quickly as to questions upon sales support?

My suggestion on leverage “http://blog.internetworkexpert.com” and “http://ieoc.com/forums/”:
I thought it will benefit your fans much more if combine them together. Currently, users need to explore two website, and more links to search information regarding similiar technical topic.
For example: “General CCIE Discussion” and “Internetwork Expert Products” now provide very similiar forums, and many question there are same or similiar.

I still see all Security Rack slots filled up to their capacity for November. Is it going to change? Taking the opportunity – can You roughly determine when new Security Workbooks will be available (3.0 Blueprint) ?

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